Archive for July, 2013

When my son turned six months old, I decided to bake milkshake cupcakes, a recipe by Laura Vitale. She has a Youtube channel, right here and a website full of her recipes. Check out the link to her Shamrock milkshake cupcakes recipe if you’d like to have the recipe for the mint frosting. Anyway, instead of making mint flavored frosting, I made chocolate frosting but went a little overboard – I added chocolate mallows on top, even decorated it with frosting. I know, sugar overload but it was a lot of fun doing this.

1) Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Line your cupcake tin with liners and set aside.

2) In a small bowl, mix together the flour, salt, vanillina and pandegliangeli, set aside.

3) In a mixing bowl fitted with a paddle attachment, cream together the sugar, oil and butter. Add the eggs and cream together until you get a smooth mixture. Add the dry ingredients and with the speed on low mix together and slowly add the milk and just mix everything to combine. DO NOT OVERMIX! Make sure you give everything a good stir with a spatula from the bottom to incorporate any bit that wasn’t mixed.

4) Scoop the batter into your lined cupcake tin, make sure it’s only filled ¾ of the way up because they will rise. Bake for 20 minutes and let cool for about 45 minutes before frosting.

The recipe makes 12 cupcakes.

To make the chocolate frosting, please check out My Basic Vanilla Cupcake post. Just add a few teaspoons of unsweetened cocoa powder to the frosting until desired chocolate taste is achieved 🙂

Like I said, I didn’t make the mint frosting, because I’m not a fan of anything sweet + mint, like choco mint candies, mint cookies etc.. For me, it just tastes weird. But anyway, the cupcakes turned out great, it was a hit with the family and I will make more of this in the future, maybe for my son’s first birthday party. I could just imagine kids (and adults) on sugar high already…uh-oh!

A salad /side dish recipe? Yeah, you read that right. This is a Filipino side dish, “ensaladang” is a borrowed Spanish word meaning salad and “labanos” is simply radish. Although the name of the dish means salad, it is a side dish, a perfect partner for fried seafood or pork.

My grandmother made this all the time when I was in grade school. It’s another one of the recipes that she never taught me or my mom to make. Usually, when she’s in the kitchen, i’d be watching her prepare the ingredients and would ask her if I can help, and grandma will always send me away. She doesn’t like anyone messing with her ‘kitchen’. That’s why, until she passed away, she never taught anyone the recipe(s) she knew!

Oh well, decades later, when I can safely say that I can handle myself inside the kitchen (now I know how my grandma feels when someone is ‘bothering’ her while cooking, haha!) I finally made my grandma’s ‘Ensaladang labanos’! And it’s just how it tasted exactly the first time she asked me to try it out, years and years and years ago. So here’s the recipe:

ENSALADANG LABANOS (Radish Salad)

1 1/2 cups radish, sliced into strips

2 small tomatoes, cut into chunks

1 small onion, sliced thinly

1/3 cup vinegar (or less, depends on how much you want to use)

1/8 cup rock salt

PROCEDURE:

1. Combine salt and radish strips and set aside for about 20 to 30 minutes. (The salting process removes the bitter taste of the radish).

2. After 30 minutes, the salted radish can now be squeezed to death (haha!) Wash the squeezed radish strips with water and drain water, or you can squeeze again, not too much this time.

3. In a glass jar or plastic container, combine the radish strips, tomatoes, onion and vinegar.

4. Serve with any kind of fried seafood or pork.

You might think that this will have a strong sour taste, but no. There is a hint of onion flavor as well as the tomato; and the crunch of the radish is just perfect if you’re looking for that certain texture in food.

This side dish can be stored in the fridge and can last for more than a week.

I’m trying hard not to get too attached to this adorable puppy…and it is DIFFICULT!

Last time I wrote about our neighbor who ‘abandons’ his dogs – he is still doing it until now. When he picked up Fiona, the shi tzu, he had a small puppy in a box. He asked my dad to take care of it, just for the night and he will pick it up the next morning. And the puppy has been with us for more than 2 weeks now, imagine that!

How can you not fall for this cuteness?! We named him BINGO, yup…from the nursery song Bingo because it’s my son’s one and only favorite song. I know, naming the pup will just get us more attached, but I’m actually wishing / praying that our neighbor would just disappear in the face of this earth and leave the dog to us. Besides, if this pup is back with him, he’ll suffer the same fate as Fiona and George – to be neglected.

As of the moment, he’s in a puppy cage. He’s too small to handle the rough play our three other older dogs do. And even though he got a ‘lick bath’ from Max (our four year old rottweiler) Bingo’s still scared of him. I’d be scared of Max too if I’m as small as Bingo and Max approaches me, hehehe!

I’m wishing that this pup is a pembroke welsh corgie…yup, that’s one of the breeds I wanted to have, but it’s a rare breed here and even if there are breeders a pup is too expensive for me. I have no idea what breed this pup is…our neighbor doesn’t know either, he doesn’t even know how many months old the puppy is, nor does he know what kind of food the pup eats…it’s another round of guessing game again.

Like this:

I love the song, I love the beat, I love the dance, I love everything about the video! Why? Because everything sort of reminds me of the 80’s…(although the dance isn’t exactly from the 80’s – it’s more of a mix from different decades) especially the rotary phone, haha! Because it’s in Japanese and because it’s Eunhyuk and Dong Hae from Super Junior!

Yeah…I’m sorry but I just had to get this out of my system. It is confirmed, Rain will be discharged from the Korean army this coming July 10! Just excited, hehe! I’ve been a fan since I watched his drama, Full House with Song Hye Kyo – I bought his albums, watched his movies, watched his first ever concert here…and now it’s out of my system…I will shut up now.

The video above shows Fiona, the Shi tzu and Chibi, my Pomeranian spitz. Fiona is our neighbor’s poor dog. She, along with another shi tzu and a dog of an unknown breed (we call him Tu-tu, we later found out his name was George) were sort of ‘abandoned’ by their owner, who happens to be our neighbor and my dad’s distant relative. The owner doesn’t come home for days, leaving no food or water for his dogs.

Fiona

It all started when we began giving bread to George; it was obvious that he was very hungry with the way he just swallows the piece of bread we throw at him through the walls. After that Fiona came along with him, she was barking at us, but what the heck, we threw a piece of bread at her and she ate it. And it was like that for days, with no sign of our neighbor coming home.

One morning, we were surprised to find Fiona in our garage, under the car! She managed to slip under their gates because she was skin and bones and yeah…we still don’t know how she got in our garage, but for the next two days, she became our little furry guest.

One thing I noticed, she doesn’t want to go back home anymore. Each time we let our other dogs out, we take Fiona along, she had all the chances to go home, but she only follows us around. She stayed with us for two more days, until our neighbor asked my dad if he saw his shi tzu. I would have loved to lie at this point, knowing that Fiona would be ‘abandoned’ again if our neighbor takes her home. So he took her home, and locked her up in their garage.

This went on for a few more days before Fiona managed to get out of their garage and waited by Max’s (our Rottweiler) dog house, waiting for us to go out of the house. For about three more days she stayed with us, believe it or not, she gained weight! I would have loved to ask the owner to let us have Fiona, but he said he was going to take her to his girlfriend’s house.

I wasn’t there when our neighbor came to pick up Fiona that evening. But according to my mom, Fiona was running away from him! Even the dog doesn’t like him…if only we had animal laws that actually work here, I would have made a complaint already. But no, we live in a country where dogs are killed for their meat. Even if there’s a law against it, not all people are aware of it – it’s a reality that sucks.

So now, I just hope that Fiona is doing way better with our neighbor’s girlfriend.